Thanks to many different readers, including new ones, who have been sending me links to the latest.
1. Another NYU professor, Lisa Duggan, who appears to be a friend and ally of Professor Ronell's, reports the following:
When NYU determined her not responsible for many of the charges against her, but responsible for sexual harassment via email and for nonsexual contact, they initially announced a decision to revoke her tenure and terminate her. She could not solicit support. When prominent academics organized a letter about her case (they were not solicited to do so by Ronell), they could not admit any knowledge that they had of the circumstances (through their networks, not via Ronell). The elitism of that letter, as objectionable as it truly is, was a hastily concocted weapon to persuade NYU to back up from a draconian penalty out of all proportion to the charges sustained. NYU administrators would understand and respond to power and status. The draconian penalty they at first considered was likely adopted to avoid a threatened lawsuit from the accuser (whose husband Noam Andrews is a member of a wealthy New York real estate family, presumably well able to fund lawsuits). The letter put them on notice that confidentiality would not fully cloak their actions. Caught between money and academic prominence, NYU backed down and put Ronell on a year’s unpaid leave instead.
Put aside the sophomoric rationalization for the now infamous Butler letter (I do find it hard to believe that this passes as "critical analysis" in certain circles), there are three interesting factual assertions here: first, that NYU's original decision was to terminate Ronell for her misconduct; second, that the infamous Butler letter caused the University to opt for a less draconian punishment; and third, that Ronell was not involved in soliciting the Butler letter. If even half the allegations in the plaintiff's complaint are accurate, it's not surprising that the original remedy would have been termination. Consider just this remarkable allegation from paragraph 101 of the complaint:
Bolstering Reitman’s fear of Ronell’s wrath, another NYU student filed a Title IX complaint against her for racial discrimination. Contrary to instructions that she had purportedly received from NYU’s Title IX personnel, Ronell told everyone in the German Department –including Reitman–about the complaint and admitted to Reitman of having spread untruths about the complainant at other universities in an effort to sabotage the student’s career. Ronell refused to speak the complainant’s name and instead referred to her as “the skunk” to other students and faculty, and openly stated to Reitman and others (in Reitman’s presence) that she would ruin the student’s career for having reported her. Having seen what Ronell did to a fellow student who had filed a Title IX complaint against her, Reitman knew that such was not an option if he wanted to ever have a career in academia.
If these allegations are true, there should be plenty of witnesses to bolster them. And if they are true, it likely would have been known to NYU's Title IX office. And if it were known to them, it would help explain why termination was recommended initially in response to a new Title IX complaint. (Professor Duggan claims, as the CHE has as well, that Professor Ronell has been suspended without pay, but as the New York lawyer, friend of the plaintiff's attorney, notes we don't actually have evidence that the suspension is "without pay".)
Prof. Duggan also asserts that Prof. Ronell played no role in soliciting the infamous Butler letter, but that is hard to square with the statements by Prof. Christiane Voss noted earlier. NYU, which has acknowledged that it is now investigating "retaliation" claims, will presumably have to reach a verdict on this.
2. Unsurprisingly, others are coming out of the woodwork with their own Avital Ronell stories. This one is particularly striking, though it is anonymous (so discount accordingly), but it is consistent with some of what the former Chair of the NYU German Department reports in his article, that will now appear this coming week, so I will link to it. Someone I know to be a former student writes:
When I was first a graduate student in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley in the early 90's, Ronell, like Butler, was treated by many of my fellow graduate students and some of the professors as a kind of god-like figure whose feeble puns and pseudo-scholarly free-associating were the very summit of the contemporary intellect. I really thought at times that I had blundered my way into an asylum. I just skimmed some of the account from Reitman's complaint that you posted--it should be unbelievable, but it's not to anyone who's seen her in action. The bit in the complaint that made me flash back to graduate school and her stomach-churning "keen wit" was the 'see you at the orifice, I mean, the office' remark; that's pretty much the kind of, uh, witticism that I had almost entirely forgotten and which one was expected to laugh uproariously at, wagging one's head at what an incomparable genius she was.
As one philosopher friend of mine (someone firmly grounded in German and French philosophy of the 18th- and 19th-centuries) summed up his impression after watching some of Ronell's on-line performances: "preposterous."
3. A big part of the narrative that has emerged is that Ronell is a "world-renowned scholar," an "academic rock star." I have to admit I'd never heard of her prior to this, though it seems clear she's well-known in some of the feebler parts of the humanities. Out of curiosity, I looked her up on "Google Scholar." Her most-cited authored work, apart from a translation of something by Derrida, 1989's The Telephone Book, has been cited about 560 times, less than, for example, my 2002 book on Nietzsche, and I'm not an "academic rock star." (The contrast with Judith Butler's Google Scholar citations is also striking.) A German professor at another university tells me that in all her years as a professor of German and Comparative Literature at NYU, Ronell has placed only two students in tenure-track positions in German Departments. I don't know what the facts are, and maybe there are far more placements in other humanities departments, but perhaps some journalists should begin scrutinizing some of the claims about her academic status, though there's no question she has some very well-known friends, like Butler and Zizek.
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